Quote:
We have so many wonderful ideas, and everyone is so enthusiastic about our subject that sometimes we need reminding of what our final goal is, so we do not get too side tracked. Charlotte Rose Morris-Wright Desert Academy

Writing the Final Report

Getting Started

Before writing a report, it is important to decide what topics and
information you will include. Developing an outline can be critical to
your success in conveying your work to your reader. You don't want to
just dump your information onto your reader (including the judges!).
To keep readers' attention, you need to present carefully structured
information that they can painlessly absorb and process.

For your Supercomputing Challenge report, you won't need to develop
an outline because we have developed one for you to use. Why? We want
to ensure that you present your work in the best possible manner. In
the past, the best-written reports have followed this outline, and we
strongly urge you to follow it as well. In technical reports, creativity
matters far less than clarity and organization.

The process of writing the report will help you prepare your information
for the oral presentation and for answering the judges' questions.

The hardest part of writing a final report is starting, so if you get
the introduction and description of your project on paper as soon as
possible, you'll have conquered the hardest part.

Build from your interim report, using it as a first draft for your
introduction and the description of your project.

Remember, some teams will become finalists based upon the quality of
their project through the written final report!

Outline

Table of contents (please include any figures, tables, and appendixes)

Executive summary (the make-or-break-you part of the report)

Do you know why you must write an executive summary? The answer
explains why it will make you or break you as far as the Supercomputing
Challenge competition goes.

An executive summary is generally read as a stand-alone document by
the bigwigs of a company to get a brief, comprehensive snapshot of a
project, from its inception to its conclusion, in order to make decisions
about supporting the project. In the case of the Supercomputing Challenge,
the executive summary is the part of the report that the judges read to
decide whether to shelve the report or to continue on to the body of the report.

covers the significant points of the report,

is well-organized and very tightly written (i.e., all necessary, but no extraneous material), and

is written in plain English rather than in technical terms (the
primary users of executive summaries are generally well-educated people
who do not necessarily have a technical background).

Body of the report

The report must show that you conducted a scientific investigation,
obtained results, and arrived at some conclusions. The following components
are all critical to the reader's understanding of and appreciation for
your work. Please be sure that you address each one clearly and completely.

An introduction describes the project, your purpose in choosing
it, and the problem's significance to you and provides necessary background
information to assist the reader in understanding your work.

A description of the project states all important details about the
scope (limits) of your work, the materials you used, and the step-by-step
methods that you incorporated.

The results include the data from your computer program and what you
learned from doing this project. Please don't mistake graphs or figures for
results. Well-designed graphs with carefully crafted captions that explain
the details of the figures could be included as part of the results but are
no substitute for a precise, detailed, and complete description of what you
did or didn't discover in the course of your project.

In your conclusions, you interpret your results based on the facts
and evidence that you have gathered. You should show that you have thoroughly
processed your results in the context of the original problem that you selected.
It is important to clearly state what was your most significant original
achievement on the project.

Recommendations are especially useful if you had to greatly narrow
the scope of your project in order to complete it in the limited time that
you had, if your results weren't at all what you expected to get, or if you
don't believe your results to be complete or accurate.

Acknowledgments (optional) give you an opportunity to thank the people
who have helped you on the project (mentors, teachers, administrators, etc.).

Reference list or bibliography

You must be sure to identify the sources from which you obtained information.
You can find formats for citing the various types of printed material (books,
reports, articles, etc.) in text books such as the Harbrace College Handbook
(Horner et al. 1998), but several examples are provided later in this packet
so that you need not go searching for another resource. The important thing
is to be complete, accurate, and consistent.

The sources must listed in alphabetical order by the authors' last names.

The sources should be readily traceable by the reader because of the
thoroughness of the information you have provided.

The sources should be presented in a consistent format (see samples of
formats provided below).

Appendixes

One or more are optional that:

are referred to in the body of the report and that follow the body
of the report in the order in which you refer to them in the body

are identified by capital letters of the alphabet, used in sequence
(the exception being when you only have one appendix, in which case
you just call it the Appendix)

provide information that supports your report but would serve as a
distraction to your reader in the body of the text

may include data, programming codes, charts, and tables

Final Reports - Citing Sources

When writing a paper for a conference, you would cite every
paper/reference that you consulted, and in the paper every time you got
information from one of the references you would cite them. Otherwise you
run the risk of it looking like you copied someone else's work. As
general guidelines:

- verbatim material from another source should appear (if short) in
quotes, or (if long) with indented margins, and should include a
reference.

- cite the work where the key ideas is described in your paper (ie. don't
just put a reference at the end of a paragraph for everything in the
paragraph).

- don't cite every sentence. A good style is to cite a reference (quote
or just a general idea) and then expand on that idea in your own words.
If you quote every sentence, I would wonder what contribution your paper
has to the field and why I am not just reading all the papers that you
quoted instead.

- you can cite with numbers (ie. [1]) or with the author's name and the
date of the publication ie. [Fisk:2001], whichever you feel is a better
style for your paper. Then at the end you would have a list of the
references:

If you want to use the name/date citation, you would do the same thing
except the [...] would contain be [Fisk:2001] instead of [1].

In some styles you list the references in the end by alphabetical order,
and sometimes you list by the order they are first referenced. Different
conferences had different styles, but for the Supercomputing Challenge you
can pick which style that you like, as long as you are consistent and give
credit where credit is due (ie. cite all of your sources).

Citing references is a great way to show the judges
that you thoroughly researched your paper and know what you are talking
about. In conferences, if you don't cite all the major work in a field
the conference committee assumes that you haven't read all of the current
work and then assumes that you don't know what you are talking about. Of
course, the Supercomputing Challenge isn't that rigid, but if you are planning on
publishing later in life it is a good idea to get into the habit of good
citations. Also, if someone used your work to further their research, I
am sure that you would want them to cite you. (Some researchers base
their success on how many times their papers have been cited).

The standard notation for a reference is a section at the end called
"References". I just looked through a huge stack of conference papers
that I am reading and they all had a "References" section. So, for the
most professional looking paper I would suggest that you use the heading
"References".

In the end of some papers they have a "references" section for papers and
books and then a section for other things they referencesd (like software,
etc). So, for example, a paper entitled
"Steganalysis of Images Created Using Current Steganography Software"
may have four different references sections: "References" (papers,
journal articles, and books), "Steganography Software References" (for the
steganography software that they used, "Transform Domain Tools" (for the
tools they used), and "Watermark and Steganography Analysis and Testing
Tools" (for the watermarking tools). So, you can divide up your
references into different types like that if you would like for clarity,
but you should have a general references section for all of your books and
papers first. (It is also fine to put all of the materials that you used
in the general references section if you would like.)

Additional Writing Hints

The hardest part of writing a final report is starting, so if you get
the introduction and description of your project on paper now, you'll
have conquered the hardest part.

Build off your interim report, using it as a first draft for your
introduction and the description of your project.

Define technical terms.

Define an acronym at its first use.

Use headings and subheadings to help the reader focus on each part of the report.

Place captions an all tables, charts, and graphics.

Use at least a 10-point font size so that the text can be easily read.

Number the pages of your report.

Proofread carefully. Don't rely on the spell checker.

See if you can get extra credit in your English class for your report.